


Goldilocks Three

by nirejseki



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: But Mostly Just Creepy Romance, Coldwave Creature AU Extravaganza, Eldritch Horrors In Love, Gen, Lovecraftian, M/M, Multi, Vaguely Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 08:00:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8789923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Never make promises in the dark. They come back to get you sometimes. 
(too fast, too slow, and just right)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Daughter of Scotland's birthday! She requested coldflashwave, total AU of some variety. So I went with one of Oneiriad's Coldwave Creature AU Extravaganza Bingo Board entries.

There were once three girls who curled together in the dark.

They were each one perfectly formed. Their lips curved like bows, their ears were round and protruded from the body, their eyes were almond-shaped and equidistant from their clearly apparent noses, their lashes long, their fingers bent, their skin as clear as can be expected, their flesh supple, their hair - blonde, brunette, black, straight, wavy, curly - was there, and normal. They were beautiful. 

They curled together in the dark.

"We will not give up," they whispered in the dark, touching fingers to tears in their perfectly formed eyes. "Yes." " _Never_."

And so a promise was made.

The first one, eldest-born, split her finger upon a tine, her blood dripping down into oven in which she was preparing the family meal.

The second one, second-eldest, cut her hand upon an axe, which she used to chop wood in the shed, outside in the winter wind.

The third, youngest and kindest, did not shed blood, yet the Elders smiled at her none-the-less. 

Three girls curled together in the dark.

"We will escape this place," they whispered in the dark, touching mouth to mouth. "Yes." " _Soon_."

And so a promise was made.

The first one, eldest-born, pretended she did not understand the books the Elders gave her, putting letters forwards and backwards, and so won herself a year to catch up.

The second one, second-eldest, lashed out with her fists, her anger cold and haughty and cruel, and so won herself a year to become amendable. 

The third, youngest and kindest, was her true-born self, yet the Elders smiled at her none-the-less.

Three girls curled in the dark.

The plans were made and set in stone; their extra year had been wisely spent, payment to be due; there was only one more night.

"We will always love each other," they whispered in the dark, touching bleeding finger to bleeding finger. "Yes." " _Always_."

And so a promise was made.

The first, eldest-born, walked away, step by step, slow and steady, and was met on the road by a man of the land, who let her ride in his car, who took her back to his church and married her on the spot.

The second, second-born, stole a car, nimble-fingered, and drove away to a city far away, and was met by a man of law, who stopped her in her tracks, who took her back to his precinct and married her on the spot.

The third, youngest and kindest, bought herself a plane ticket and flew through the air, faster than imagining, wind blowing past her fingers through a thick pane of glass, and when she disembarked she was met by a man of science, who helped her with her bag, who took her back to his home and married her on the spot.

So they lived, and they were beautiful, and they curled together in the dark no more. 

And yet promises had been made, and promises do not so easily forget. 

The first, eldest-born, belly round and arms strong, bore her son in the dark, slowly and painfully, her legs shaking and her blood pooling, but he was perfectly formed, and he was beautiful. 

The second, second-born, eyes narrow and fingers nimble, bore her son in the dark, not too fast but not so slow, and her pain came later, after, but he was perfectly formed, and he was beautiful. 

The third, youngest and kindest, put it off as long as she could, through medicine and caution, thinking of the way the Elders would smile at her, but in the end accidents happen and her man of science was so pleased, and so she, too, bore her son in the dark, quick as a wink in less than an hour, and there was no pain, and he was perfectly formed, and he was beautiful.

Seven miles north, lived the eldest, working with her man of the land.

Seven miles west, lived the second-eldest, fighting with her man of the law. 

Seven miles east, lived the youngest, happy with her man of science.

And yet promises had been made, and promises do not so easily forget. 

The first, eldest-born, watched her son grow: he was slow, but strong; he loved the flame of the oven; he read his letters forwards and backwards; and he did not love the land. 

The second, second-born, watched her son grow: he was neither too fast nor too slow; he loved the cold of the winter; his fingers were nimble and he bore the pain of fists lashing out; and he did not love the law.

The third, youngest and kindest, watched her son grow: he was quick, and smiled often; he was kind and passionate and cheerful and true; and he loved science.

And yet promises had been made, and promises do not so easily forget. 

The first, eldest-born, died sleeping, the flames of the oven that had devoured her blood coming for the rest of her at last, a slow, crackling death that consumed her and her man of the land and all which they had built: all but her son.

The second, second-born, died awake, the cold of the winter that had devoured her blood eating into her bones at last, a death neither too slow nor too fast, a winter storm and a locked door which lulled her into eternal sleep, a death that consumed her and left her man of the law free to destroy all which they had built: all but her son.

The third, youngest and kindest, died not once but a dozen times.

But death is not enough to stop a promise.

The eldest-born’s son was slow, and loved flame, and though his kin back in Massachusetts would have taken him in gladly, the mail that carried the news burned, and he escaped that place.

The second-born’s son was patient and unyielding, and though his kin back in Massachusetts would have taken him in gladly, the man of the law that was his sire froze the processes of inspection of the treatment of children so that no news was sent, and he escaped that place. 

The third-born’s son was quick and cheerful, and though his kin back in Massachusetts would have taken him in gladly, his neighbor took him in so fast that there was never any news at all, and he escaped that place.

Their mothers’ promises waited for them in the dark.

\---------------------------(too slow)-----------------------------------

_Iä! Iä! Mordiggian fm'latgh!_

Mick liked fire. 

He liked looking at it, he liked touching it, and – when no one was looking – he liked eating it.

He was big and he was slow, and sometimes the world passed him by before he noticed. This did not bother him. Sometimes, just for fun, he liked to slow the world down, too; if he was not careful, what he slowed did not again speed back up and a little more of the world’s energy slid away into the abyss.

Those around him did not understand him, and mocked him, and his wrath upon them, though rarely loosed, was terrible. The lucky ones fell to his fists and were spared, the indifferently lucky fell to his flames and died, the unlucky he drew into the void of himself to feast gloriously upon their souls.

He never mentioned the last one.

It seemed crass.

It was after the death of his parents in a flame incautiously created that he began to realize he might not be entirely normal. Slow, the authorities said critically, very slow. He read forwards and backwards, his speech sometimes did not come quick enough, and his thoughts sometimes needed extra time to coalesce. They placed him apart from the others, with the children who the authorities claimed did not look but in reality saw all too well, and swiftly forgot about him. 

The first of the worshippers came to him from the graveyard.

Their hands were pale with lack of sunlight and their nails were torn and dirty from digging up through the dirt, their mouths gaped open and their teeth were jagged, and they laid offerings at his door and window. 

Mick tried to shoo them away.

It didn’t seem to work.

In the end, it was faster to simply swallow their offerings down, engulfed whole and dissolved within him, and nothing of them remained in the waking world or the dreamlands. It made the worshippers happy, at any rate. 

He walked through the world, slow and lumbering, and he delighted in the flames that warmed his cold dark heart, black and opaque, and at times they tried to lock him away, though when he tired of their confinement it was simple enough to simply become as shadow, swirling and spinning, and leave through a crack in the wall. 

Yet for all that flame delighted him, it was not enough to sate his hungers. A thought arose: perhaps the worshippers were right after all, and he ought to let them feed him, but he suspected that that was an easy answer, a wrong answer, and he declined to take upon the mantle of the charnel. 

He walked through the world, and he was slow, and the world grew slow around him.

And then – by chance – he found part of the answer he sought.

He found _him_.

\---------------------------(just right)-----------------------------------

_Iä! Iä! Ithaqua gotha!_

Len does not suffer the way other people do.

Why would he? 

He has a _sister_.

True, she is not _exactly_ as he is – he is not quite sure what exactly the difference is, only certain that it is somehow profound – but she is his none-the-less. He cares for her, parting the snow over her head so that even the fiercest blizzard lands only as soft and pleasant flakes upon her eyelashes; he feeds her, hands that suffer not the cold making meal after meal from boxes; he kills for her, ripping apart whosoever insults her until his face is drenched with blood and his eyes glow red.

He feels a grudging sort of appreciation for his sire, whom he otherwise despises, for giving him this most precious of gifts, and so unwisely grants him clemency, two score years beyond the cold, when he is yet small and does not know better. He has cause to regret such a grant, later in life, but a promise is a promise.

The day will come, soon, when two score years pass, and his father quails in unreasoning, unknowing terror as each winter draws close, the faithful servant at its post, the dog on its leash, just waiting to be given the go-ahead to take its prey.

Len’s fingers are nimble and his mind is clever, and he becomes an excellent thief in his own right. He enjoys it: to outwit the mechanical and the mortal, to claim possession over that which was once another. He walks through the sky as easily as upon the earth, and those who join his – not cult, no, he refuses to have one of those, having abandoned them long before – those that join his _crews_ , small as they may be, know well the penalty for leaving before he has done with them.

He plans out his crimes, each greater and more clever than the next.

The men and women who join together under his command, lured in by greed and the promise of gold, keep their eyes fixed upon him when he speaks, lest they look around them and see the other crew members, the ones that are not birds nor bats not found elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, cackling with ill-rumor, oleaginous flesh visible where chitinous scale fades into talons. Those serve him in his plans, too, those creatures that come from the Cold Waste and which he sometimes must argue with the Crawling Chaos over possession thereof. 

Sometimes those arguments escalate into fist fights, or occasionally very aggressive Scrabble tournaments. 

(Len wins.)

(The Crawling Chaos sulks, being as it is a very sore loser.)

Lisa is not permitted to join his crews, not yet, though her eyes have been trained since birth to see perhaps a little too well beyond the corners. The Thousand Forms bounced her upon his knee when her mind was still too young to understand terror, and nightgaunts stand guard upon her dreams. Her eyes are a little too wide, her smile a little too brittle, but she plays whenever she will in the wood of N’gai with its wailing dweller, bathes when she will in the Lake Hali (avoiding the city, of course) and stole her very favorite yellow silk blouse from the Thing in Ygiroth, and she is content. 

Len has no doubt she will make a terrifying queen one day, once she determines what her realm will be.

Yet he still feels – 

It’s not enough.

The thefts, the adrenaline – it’s not _enough_.

There’s something missing.

He is neither too fast nor too slow, and sometimes he itches to be one or the other, but it is not his nature. He needs more. He needs –

It is just when he is ready to claw off his own flesh that Mick finds him.

Yes.

This.

“Too slow,” he tells Mick, whose jagged smile extends well beyond his cheeks and fills the room with the engulfing energies of the dark aeons, the necromantic dragon walking free at last. “And I’m just right.”

“We’re missing one,” Mick says, head bowing in a nod. “Too fast.”

“Yes,” Len says, and draws Mick to him, and him to Mick, and the void which devours flame meets that which cannot suffer cold, and both are made content, for just a little longer.

But they know now what they are searching for.

And they will _find him_.

\---------------------------(too fast)-----------------------------------

_Iä! Iä! Iod ilyaa! Hastur 'ai! Yog-Sothoth fhtagn!_

Barry has always been just that slightest bit too _fast_ for everyone.

It made his father laugh to see how quickly he dashed around, first on his hands and knees, then toddling on little feet, always first one into the breach, always first one in trouble. 

Sometimes his father can’t seem to _stop_ laughing.

Barry laughs as well, playing with the invisible bulbous viscous creatures that drift into his bedroom from the dreamlands, swimming in the tub that seems to go on for miles and might have a city sleeping underneath, paints formless spawn with black ichor in his kindergarten class, and sometimes sings in tongues that make the world around him weep tears of blood for love of him. 

As a child, Barry thought his name was pronounced _byakhee_ , and jumped around, making buzzing sounds, but as he grows he knows it is not so. He is a smiling one, shining-eyed, the key and the guardian of the gate, and he possesses infinite knowledge yet still managed to get only a B+ on his latest English exam, which, _unfair_.

Who tests sixth graders on Austen, anyhow?!

His father is a man of science, a man of medicine; his mother is loving. His mother is beautiful, and as she ages she grows more beautiful still, to his eyes: her ears shrink a little, coming close to the skull; her eyes bulge and her eyelashes narrow, and she does not blink perhaps as often as she ought; her neck develops small, almost unseen slits that flex in the air as if seeking water.

They go to the local pool quite often.

Barry crowns himself in ivy and darts around, eager to see it all, take in it all. He makes friends easily – sometimes too easily – and he knows he’s looking for something, that something (or someone) is looking for _him_.

Something finds him.

Barry is young and tender, his body still stretching out to encompass the smallest portion of what he is-was-will be, and his Enemy is old beyond years and has come for him from beyond the stars.

Barry escapes, but his Enemy kills his mother before the unseen army marches at Barry’s command to cast him out. 

(No one can live in that house, ever after, no matter what the real estate agents say about how fine it looks on paper. The one man who tried had to be institutionalized for his own protection after three months, screaming of war never-ending and a hatred that grows larger than the stars.)

Barry waits, and waits, and once he grows into his power, he tries to go back to fix it, to save her, he goes a dozen times over, but it does not help. The Enemy was well-prepared, and he has to consider the consequences.

You crack reality _one time_ and suddenly everyone’s yelling at you. 

Sheesh. 

It’s not a goddamn broken teacup, okay? 

Besides, he fixed the hole he ripped in space-time, didn’t he? Well. Mostly. He sewed it up with thread woven from the dead heart of a black hole and you can _barely_ notice the stitches left behind, and Cisco can stop bitching about his brother _any time now_ or Barry will bring him back from the World Beyond, whole and entire and maybe a few little essential parts (the ones that make you human, and sane) missing, and see how Cisco likes _that_.

But by and large, Barry likes his life. He’s happy, mostly. He loves Cisco and Caitlin, though he teases; he loves Iris, his dear friend, and her family. He gets faster and faster, every year, and his cult holds sway over his City, which never notices how strange things sometimes become – the shoggoths that slither heavy-footed through the streets like some indescribable eye-filled trolly car, their gelatinous forms yawning as they waited for traffic lights to change; hunting horrors loping through the streets at night, gnawing on piles of trash and hitching rides with garbage trucks; moon-beasts croaking love songs that sometimes color the sky in numinous glyphs – and which loves and adores him.

He’s missing something, but he knows that something is coming, that it will find him soon, and he is content to wait.

And then he sees them.

Not it.

_Them._

The Elder Gods themselves could not have dreamt such bliss.

"Captain Cold and Heatwave, I think," Cisco remarks. "What do you think, Barry?"

Barry replies in a language long since dead and gone from this earth, the tongue of Yith, which was very fussy with its verb tenses but which was _excellent_ for swearing.

"I'm...gonna take that as a yes, 'kay, buddy?"

"Call them what you want," Barry says. "I will call them mine."

He flirts a little first, of course. A little skirmish that takes out half of the main throughway, renders the nearby police deaf in one ear, and makes each rat in the vicinity grow to twice its size. 

"The Flash," the great void says, his voice deep and slow like the rumblings of an age in which mountains grow. "Too fast."

"My name's Barry," Barry says, suddenly shy. Not every day you meet your matches, after all.

"Len," the absolute cold, encased in the tender meat of human flesh, says. 

"Len?"

"My name," he clarifies. "Leonard Snart. I'm just right."

"Mick Rory," the void adds, idly sucking the nearby electric systems into a dead splutter and a burst of fire on all the light poles. "I'm too slow."

"Barry Allen," Barry says, understanding dawning at last. "I'm too fast. We fit together."

"No!" Barry's ancient Enemy cries, ripping free the disguise he wore as Barry's mentor. "I will not permit it!"

He is arrayed in armor, and all those around him are instantly destroyed. 

Barry pouts, and brings Cisco and Caitlin back, a quick wrinkle of time that sends them back to STAR Labs instead of out here, on the main drive. After a second's thought, he does the same to Eddie. Iris likes him.

"I have gathered my armies," the Enemy From Beyond The Stars says, foaming from his many mouths, eyeballs drooling slimy ichor that burns at the touch. "I have made myself ready. I will have you! Not they! I will bring to you the final death, the ecstasy of oblivion, and it shall be I alone!"

Jealousy is _so_ unbecoming, no matter the species.

No means no, man.

Len reaches for Barry's hand - one of several dozen, at the moment - and Mick reaches for another.

Three puzzle pieces click together as if made for the purpose - and indeed, they were. An unholy triad, the inverted blasphemous trinity; bound by promise and will, they are unstoppable.

The Enemy roars, and attacks anyway.

Only one meets the ecstasy of final death that day, the roiling blackness eternal in the arms of Cynothoglys, and it is not Barry, nor Len, nor Mick.

Mick might have eaten parts of him first.

Barry turns to his triad and says, "Do you like my City?"

"I was born here and dispute ownership," Len says. "But I must say I love what you've done with the place."

"I was the second city," Mick offers. "For remembrance and shadow."

They contemplate these matters for an eon, or perhaps only moments.

"Nice as the place is, Barry, and happy as I am to make it my home, maybe we ought to go traveling first," Len says.

"Traveling?" Barry asks.

"To visit our kin-by-the-sea," Mick explains. "We've been waiting for you."

Barry finds his mouth stretching into a smile that twists the world. "Yes," he says. "I would like that."

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three beings of power beyond man's imagination curl together in the dark.

"We will love each other always," they whisper, voices one, blood spilt between them.

"We will get away from the places which bind us," they whisper, voices three, mouths together.

"We will _never_ give this up," they whisper, voices many, as the tears of mankind flood the earth before their presence.

The promise is fulfilled.


End file.
